Beauty and employment

Just read an interesting piece of research: http://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1927

Essentially, the researchers created a large set of CVs that are otherwise identical except the inclusion of applicants' photos.  The CVs variously contain photos of an attractive male (AM), plain-looking male (PM), attractive female (AF), and plain-looking female (PF), and no photos (NM and NF).  They sent the CVs in response to different job advertisements and analyzed the call-back rates from the employers.

Here are the findings in terms of call-back rates:

For male: AM > NM > PM
For female: NF > PF » AF

Across genders: NF > NM

These ordering are robust to jobs requiring prior experience, and whether the jobs require the applicants to face the public or just stay inside the office.  However, on further scrutiny, the researchers find that these differences are largely due to employment agencies.  If the companies do the hiring themselves, then the call-back rates are mostly indistinguishable, except for the attractive females, who are still penalized.  The researchers conducted a series of follow-up works and tests and concluded that the most likely explanation is female jealousy and envy.

Moral of the story: (1) If you're a good-looking female, maybe you should avoid showing people your photos when looking for jobs; (2) If you're a good-looking male, then attaching your photo may give you an advantage, especially when dealing with head-hunters; (3) It may not be a good idea to use an employment agency because it tends to focus on appearance, which should be irrelevant.

Another interesting side note is that when I asked my good friend to guess the outcome of this research last night, she almost gave me the exact same ordering as those above.  Her explanation was that most of the hiring work in companies is done by HR, and HR will likely favor AM and penalize AF.  Her reasoning is strikingly consistent with the employment agency finding shown in the research, and largely in line with the jealousy/envy explanation too!  I must admit that before I saw this research I thought AF should always command an advantage in job seeking.  Turns out I was wrong.

This is also the beauty of research -- people may have different speculation/experience on certain social phenomena, and it is through rigorous research design and data collection and analysis that we can arrive at more informed conclusions.  How we can make use of these findings and conclusions is, of course, up to the individual readers.